Welcome to the second installment of Entropy’s “Month in Books” feature, where we highlight small press new releases at the end of every month. If you’re a press and don’t see your books here, email dennis@entropymag.org and we’ll get you involved in the March post.
Michael Sweet’s Coney Island by Michael Ernest Sweet
Brooklyn Arts Press
140 pages – BAP/Amazon
“The digital revolution has changed photography forever. As tempting as it is to regard it as an egalitarian, popular revolution of the form, the democratization of the photographic image, with its casual emphasis on verisimilitude and documentation, runs the risk of erasing classical distinctions of authorship and craft to the point of diminishing the role of the artist altogether. Not everyone is an artist, nor should everyone aspire to be one. Not everyone “has an eye,” as the classic synecdoche has it, and not everyone has the sensitivity or intuitiveness, or perhaps even the perverse will and intention, to pursue a pure vision as an artist or photographer. So when someone like Michael Ernest Sweet makes a visual statement of such admirable consistency and acute perverseness, attention must be paid…” —From the Foreword by Bruce LaBruce
Dead Horse by Niina Pollari
Birds, LLC
83pages – Birds, LLC /Amazon
“These poems are so rhythmic you can almost ride them. Moving through the daily deaths of the earth, the questions of what to hold together and what to let, Niina Pollari writes from a place where emotion meets bone, exploring what it means to be a blood container. You will see your own skull.” —Melissa Broder
A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us by Caleb Curtiss
Back Lawrence Press
37 pages – Black Lawrence / SPD
“My sister / is not a woman, a girl, or even / a real someone or something. / Not anymore.” The poems in A TAXONOMY OF THE SPACE BETWEEN US by Caleb Curtiss impress fifteen assertions, attempts, and urges toward order on the cavernous and impossible expanse that remains after the speaker’s sister “drove past a stop sign and then, / didn’t do anything ever again.” Curtiss sits right down in the abyss and dwells with the loss, the space where “not wanting a new emergency, / but also, not wanting another old emergency to return,” we are forced to live with the aching present and the people who continue to exist within it. Probing earnestly at familial and human connection through the smudged and banged-up lens of loss and loss’s aftermath, these poems rebuild the schemas that erode under the weight of untimely death. Through a taxonomy which risks both beauty and longing in the face of irrevocable loss, Curtiss’s poems seek to reorient the world after its nature is revealed to be arbitrary and its motives unknowable. —From Small Press Distribution
Art & Understanding: The Anthology edited by Chael Needle and Dianne Goettel
Black Lawrence Press
288 pages – Black Lawrence /Amazon
Art & Understanding: The Anthology includes work from emerging, celebrated, and forgotten writers who have contributed work to A & U Magazine over the past twenty years. In fact, the occasion for the anthology’s publication is the celebration of the magazine’s twentieth anniversary of publishing thoughtful and artistic responses to AIDS. —From the Black Lawrence Press website
Empty Pockets: New and Selected Stories by Dale Herd
Coffee House Press
228 pages – Coffee House /Amazon
From high school love notes to a drug runner’s day; from a motel room abortion to a cross-country breakup, Dale Herd’s stories travel the backroads of America to present us with postcard revelations of life as it is lived. —From the Coffee House website
Jillian by Halle Butler
Curbside Splendor
240 pages – Curbside Splendor /Amazon
Megan, recently out of college and working a meaningless job as a gastroenterologist’s secretary, openly hates all of her friends for being happy and successful. She makes herself feel better by obsessively critiquing the behavior of her coworker, Jillian, a rapid cycling, grotesque optimist, whose downfall is precipitated by the purchase of a dog. —From the Curbside Splendor website
Exercises in Criticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Constraint by Louis Bury
Dalkey Archive Press
290 pages – Dalkey Archive /Amazon
Exercises in Criticism is an experiment in applied poetics in which critic and poet Louis Bury utilizes constraint-based methods in order to write about constraint-based literature. By tracing the lineage and enduring influence of early Oulipian classics, he argues that contemporary American writers have, in their adoption of constraint-based methods, transformed such methods from apolitical literary laboratory exercises into a form of cultural critique, whose usage is surprisingly widespread, particularly among poets and “experimental” novelists. More, Bury’s own use of critical constraints functions as a commentary on how and why we write and talk about books, culture, and ideas. —From the Dalkey Archive website
Fancy by Jeremy M. Davies
Ellipsis Press
248 pages – Ellipsis Press /Amazon
An elderly shut-in delivers a series of pet-sitting instructions to a young couple who’ve come to watch over his many, many cats. A story (or series of stories) about the ways that methodical, abstract systems interface with messy, personal obsessions, Fancy is a kissing cousin to the work of both the late Henry James and the early Thomas Bernhard: an object lesson in how our need to make sense of the world winds up devouring it whole. —From the Ellipsis Press website
Discomfort by Evelyn Hampton
Ellipsis Press
144 pages – Ellipsis Press /Amazon
“[A] beautifully constructed collection of stories—slim, spare, and mysterious… a subtly assured voice … The overall feeling is one of microscopy—as if Hampton has us looking so close, has us rooted so deeply into the grit of her characters’ experiences, that the edges and the context get lost … The stories feel real, feel like they get at some essential, mundane ill-ease, even if we could not say precisely how their odd, looping logic reflects our experience, except in so far as we all live within the closed loops of our bodies and minds.” —Heavy Feather Review
On Immunity by Eula Biss
Graywolf Press (US) / Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK)
216pages – Graywolf / Fitzcarraldo /Amazon
On becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear—fear of the government, the medical establishment, what is in your child’s air, food, mattress, medicine, and vaccines. She finds that you cannot immunize your child, or yourself, from the world.
In this bold, fascinating book, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. As she hears more and more fears about vaccines, Biss researches what they mean for her own child, her immediate community, America and the world, historically and in the present moment. She extends a conversation with other mothers to meditations on Voltaire’s Candide, Bram Stoker’sDracula, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond.On Immunity is a moving account of how we are all interconnected—our bodies and our fates. —From the Graywolf website
Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries by Ander Monson
Graywolf Press
176 pages – Graywolf /Amazon
Readers of physical books leave traces: marginalia, slips of paper, fingerprints, highlighting, inscriptions. All books have histories, and libraries are not just collections of books and databases, but a medium of long-distance communication with other writers and readers.
Letter to a Future Lover collects several dozen brief pieces written in response to library ephemera—with “library” defined broadly, ranging from university institutions to friends’ shelves, from a seed library to a KGB prison library—and addressed to readers past, present, and future.
Through these witty, idiosyncratic essays, Ander Monson reflects on the human need to catalog, preserve, and annotate; the private and public pleasures of reading; the nature of libraries; and how the self can be formed through reading and writing. —From the Graywolf website
The Infernal: A Novel by Mark Doten
Graywolf Press
440 pages – Graywolf Press /Amazon
In the early years of the Iraq war, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the US government speculates: Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know? In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts “perfect confessions,” is retrieved from the vaults. Over the course of four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are familiar: Osama Bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg. Others are less so. But each one has a role in the world shaped by the war on terror. Each wants to tell us: this is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be. This is The Infernal. —From the Graywolf website
The Bicycle Year by Caroline Cabrera
H_NGM_N Books
104 pages – H_NGM_N /Amazon
“What I love about Caroline’s “The Bicycle Year” is how it seems casual and breezy, carefree with summer blues and glorious light, while being so frighteningly obsessive in its desire to get it right, to get it down, to say something definitive and lasting about the ephemeral nature of time and our existence in it.” —Nate Pritts
Bipolar Cowboy by Noah Cicero
Lazy Fascist Press
124 pages – Amazon
Bipolar Cowboy is “a book of love poems for all those who loved so deeply it crossed into mental illness.” If you’ve ever loved so much you lost your mind, if you’ve ever felt inclined to wander into the desert to die alone, then take the bipolar cowboy’s hand. He’s ready to see you through to the end. —From the Lazy Fascist website
Skullcrack City by Jeremy Robert Johnson
Lazy Fascist Press
344 pages – Amazon
“A nightmarish yet hilarious journey that begins in the ugly world of toxic mortgages and progresses to the slightly uglier world of brain-eating monsters lurking in dark alleys. You’re in for an entirely unpredictable ride, the tale spinning ludicrously out of control as the hero uncovers layer after grotesque layer of a vast macabre conspiracy.Skullcrack City is original, utterly insane, and a shitload of fun.” —David Wong, author of John Dies at the End
Lazy Fascist Double #1: Messes of Men/Lemon Heart by Michael J. Seidlinger and Matthew Revert
Lazy Fascist Press
112 pages – Amazon
What if your mother was a wedge of lemon? Would you still be a mess? The first Lazy Fascist double features two original works, Messes of Men by Michael J Seidlinger and Lemon Heart by Matthew Revert. —From the Lazy Fascist website
The Scapegoat by Sophia Nokolaidou
Melville House
320 pages – Melville House /Amazon
In 1948, the body of an American journalist is found floating in the bay off Thessaloniki. A Greek journalist is tried and convicted for the murder . . . but when he’s released twelve years later, he claims his confession was the result of torture.
Flash forward to modern day Greece, where a young, disaffected high school student is given an assignment for a school project: find the truth. —From the Melville House website
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber
Melville House
272 pages – Melville House /Amazon
Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And just how much are our lives being ruined by all this nonstop documentation?
To answer these questions, anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice. Is the inane, annoying paperwork we confront every day really a cipher for state violence? And is the capitalist promise of salvation-through-technology just a tool for the powerful to exert more control? Graeber provides a forceful, radical answer to these questions, though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. —From the Melville House website
Crow-Work by Eric Pankey
Milkweed Editions
88 pages – Milkweed /Amazon
“What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?” Eric Pankey asks in his new collection, Crow-Work. This central question drives Pankey’s ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Brueghel’sProcession to Calvary, Anish Kapoor’s Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio’s series of severed heads, and James Turrell’s experimentation with light and color, the author travels to an impossible past, despite being firmly rooted in the present, to seek out the songbird in every thorn thicket. Short bursts of lyrical beauty burn away ”like coils of incense ash.” Bodies in the light of a cave flicker, coalesce, and disappear. By capturing the ephemeral beauty of life in these poems, Crow-Workseeks not only to explain great art, but to embody it. —From the Milkweed website
Adventures in Immediate Reality by Max Blecher
New Directions
128 pages – New Directions /Amazon
Adventures in Immediate Irreality, the masterwork of the Romanian writer Max Blecher, vividly paints the crises of “irreality” that plagued him in his youth: eerie unsettling mirages wherein he would glimpse future events. In gliding chapters that move with a peculiar dream logic of their own, this memoiristic novel sketches the tremulous, frightening, and exhilarating awakenings of a very young man. —From the New Directions website
Love Hotel by Jane Unrue
New Directions
208 pages – New Directions /Amazon
Working on behalf of a cunning and mysterious couple, a woman embarks on a haunting search for a stranger (a child? somebody’s lover? a ghost?), undertaking a perplexing, dangerous, and apparently timeless journey that originates on a secluded country estate and leads deep into the center of the city. Love Hotel explores a heartbreaking and nightmarish world of unrelenting excess, impossible convergences, undeniable urges, and inexorable loss. Jane Unrue’s writing, beautifully cunning and mysterious, twists and turns and lures the reader on with an erotic magnetism of its own. —From the New Directions website
Her 37th Year, An Index by Suzanne Scanlon
Noemi Press
Noemi Press
Her 37th Year, An Index is the story of a year in one woman’s life. Structured as an index, the work is a collage of excerpted conversations, letters, quotations, moments, and dreams. An exploration of longing and desire, the story follows a moment of crisis in a marriage and in the life of a woman who remains haunted by an unassimilable past. Allan Gurganus called an early version of the work a “thoroughly engrossing almanac of desire” when it was published by The Iowa Review. —From the Noemi Press website
The Refusal of Suitors by Ryo Yamaguchi
Noemi Press
Noemi Press
The Refusal of Suitors draws on Penelope and her loom to engage the landscapes, wants, forms, and ultimately the repetitions and variations of contemporary urban life. Through varying styles, voices, and layouts, these poems move collectively with a sonic force, the “pure acoustics of declaratives,” through “a night that begins / with our falling asleep, the wet paragraph that he aspirates,” with a visionary amalgam of phenomenon and symbol. From long-lined, romantic odes to tight, pictorial meditations akin to classical Asian poetry—from the jocular to the reposed to the amorous to the despondent—these are poems that are never satisfied, that relish the “sweet chorea of the longest day.” —From the Noemi Press website
The Railway by Hamid Ismailov
Restless Books
336 pages – Amazon
Set mainly in Uzbekistan between 1900 and 1980, The Railway introduces to us the inhabitants of the small town of Gilas on the ancient Silk Route. Among those whose stories we hear are Mefody-Jurisprudence, the town’s alcoholic intellectual; Father Ioann, a Russian priest; Kara-Musayev the Younger, the chief of police; and Umarali-Moneybags, the old moneylender. Their colorful lives offer a unique and comic picture of a little-known land populated by outgoing Mullahs, incoming Bolsheviks, and a plethora of Uzbeks, Russians, Persians, Jews, Koreans, Tatars, and Gypsies.
At the heart of both the town and the novel stands the railway station—a source of income and influence, and a connection to the greater world beyond the town. Rich and picaresque, The Railway is full of color. Sophisticated yet with a naive delight in storytelling, it chronicles the dramatic changes felt throughout Central Asia in the early twentieth century. —From the Restless Books website
The Do-Over by Kathleen Ossip
Sarabande Books
96 pages – Sarabande /Amazon
“How do you stay in heaven?” Ossip asks, “Is it a kind of sophisticated rewind?” Her third collection of poems is haunted by the idea of ‘rewind,’ and especially by the teasing possibility that we, too—like the moon, like a plant—may be granted cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The book’s overarching narrative is the death of the poet’s stepmother-in-law, a cherished, loving, eccentric woman who returns to its pages again and again. But in spite of its focused grief and ontological urgency, The Do-Over is a varied collection—short acrostics mourn recently dead cultural icons (Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Donna Summer); there’s an ode to an anonymous Chinese factory worker, three “true stories” that read like anecdotes told over drinks, andmore. The Do-Over is an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure, a fragmented portrait of its difficult, much loved subject. It’s also a snapshot of our death-obsessed, death-denying cultural moment, which in Ossip’s gifted hands turns out to be tremulous, skeptical, unsure of ultimate values and, increasingly, driven to find them. “I am still studying, aren’t you?” she begins. Readers will eagerly embrace the surprise, humor, and seriousness of her quest. —From the Sarabande website
Father Brother Keeper by Nathan Poole
Sarabande Books
144 pages – Sarabande /Amazon
Stories set in rural Georgia investigate small moments that illuminate life-altering struggles: A man slipping into dementia is abandoned at a diner with his granddaughters; a boy descendent of farmers discovers his love of carving wooden birds but buries his creations in shame; bait dogs are left to die, chained in the woods, when they grow too old to fight. —From the Sarabande website
major characters in minor films by Kristy Bowen
Sundress Publications
140 pages – Sundress
“In Kristy Bowen’s major characters in minor films, language moves like a camera, cutting from image to image, leaving impressions that form intriguing fragmented narratives of love, intrigue, mystery and damage. Populated with both the familiar and the strange, with rabbits and birds as well as whiskey and fire, the journey through the scenes these poems create is a wild and rich ride.” —Donna Vorreyer, author of A House of Many Windows
The Boatmaker by John Benditt
Tin House Books
400 pages – Tin House /Amazon
A fierce and complicated man wakes from a fever dream compelled to build a boat and sail away from the isolated island where he was born. Encountering the wider world for the first time, the reluctant hero falls into a destructive love affair, is swept up into a fanatical religious movement, and finds himself a witness to racial hatred unlike anything he’s ever known. The boatmaker is tempted, beaten, and betrayed: his journey marked by chilling episodes of violence and horror while he struggles to summon the strength to make his own way. The Boatmaker is a fable for our times, a passionate love story, and an odyssey of self-discovery. —From the Tin House website
Pelican by Emily O’Neill
YesYes Books
112 pages – YesYes
Emily O’Neill was born on the bedroom floor in her mother’s childhood home and has been making loud messes ever since. She is a writer, artist, and proud Jersey girl, but owes her poetry education to Cambridge’s Cantab Lounge, home of the the Boston Poetry Slam. Her first collection, Pelican, won the Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books and her work has been featured inThe Best Indie Lit New England, Sugar House Review, and Whiskey Island. Her poem “de Los Muertos” was selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of Gigantic Sequins’ second annual poetry contest. She has a degree in the synaesthesia of storytelling from Hampshire College and lives in Medford, MA. —Emily O’Neill author bio
